Nike Puts Slick Spin on Consumer-Gen Ad Craze

For a marketing trend to be legit, Nike jumps on board and makes it legit, letting everybody else make mistakes before it swoops in with its gigantor marketing team and victorious hear-me-roar worldview.

To illustrate, they improved on Dove's decent but docile Real Beauty campaign, not just representing imperfections but embracing them with manic ferocity, even writing little manifestos about the merits of thunder thighs - which would be crazy-lame if done by anybody else but Nike.

So it's apt that they call their take on consumer-generated ads The Second Coming. And instead of begging for whatever you can pull out of your ass (a method yielding only ironic or lackluster results), they've wrapped an iron fist around the potential outcomes.

With footage featuring all-stars like Bryant, LeBron and Nash, users can manipulate the order of the clips and choose a version of a hand-picked theme song, The Second Coming by Juelz Santana and Just Blaze.

Stringent much? Hell yes. Nike's careful about the brand appropriation pitbull. While such controls get frowns from zealous consumer-is-king marketers, the swoosh goddess didn't become an ideology powerhouse for nothing.

Users can download their mash-ups or disseminate them on mobile phones. No promises of ad spots here. This is less a consumer-generated ad thing and more an interactivity-with-the-brand thing. And these days, we like that somebody has the discipline to hold fast to their position.